According to reports, Jimmy Munganga, first president of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Court of Auditors, has gone public with corruption accusations against former Gécames chairman Albert Yuma Mulimbi, a key figure in Congolese economic and political life, as well as ex-central banker Deogratias Mutombo Mwana Nyembo.

The two men are accused of, among other things, contributing to a $25 million fraud. The money mysteriously disappeared between 2018 and 2020.

Speaking on the Radio-Télévision Nationale Congolaise news programme on October 23, Munganga said that “mismanagement” by the two men was behind “embezzlement amounting to $25,521,000” – $15m at the Congolese mining giant, Gécamines, and around $10.5m at the DRC public treasury.

Submitted to the court in March, the audit conducted by the Inspection Générale des Finances (IGF) – a key institution in President Félix Tshisekedi’s reported anti-corruption drive – also implicates other senior officials: Jacques Kamenga, managing director of Gécamines; Guy Okende Ngongo and Freddy Muganza, directors at the central bank, and Antoine Kiala Ndombele, an executive at Rawbank.

In September 2021, the anti-corruption agency launched an extensive audit of the management of the emblematic public company, for the 2010-2020 period, when Yuma chaired the board of directors. A few months before the audit was launched, Tshisekedi had announced his intention to renegotiate mining contracts signed during the two terms of his predecessor, Joseph Kabila. This initiative had so far resulted in a review of the “contract of the century” signed with China in 2008. However, Tshisekedi said he wanted a more comprehensive review of the sector to be carried out as well.

Yuma, a Katangan known to be close to former president Joseph Kabila - under whose mandate he became head of the board of directors of the country’s state-owned mining company in 2010 - was removed as chairman of the Gécamines board of directors on December 3, 2021, and replaced by little-known Alphonse Kaputo Kalubi.

Yuma had remained at the head of Gécamines for more than a decade. But it is clear that Tshisekedi’s vast clean-up operation, which began at the end of 2021 with a management makeover, is not over yet.

Munganga quickly moved to ensure the suspects remain at the disposal of the court, and called for the suspects to be banned from leaving the country and for commercial banks to freeze their accounts.

Yuma, a former head of the private-sector Fédération des Entreprises du Congo who is reputedly close to Kabila’s family, was dismissed from Gécamines in 2021. He has been dogged ever since by cases of fraud and corruption that occurred while he headed the company.

His name was also mentioned in “Congo Hold-up”, a vast investigation carried out by a consortium of 19 media outlets and NGOs into alleged embezzlement committed by Kabila and his family. In November 2021, a leak - dubbed Congo Hold-up - of financial documents from Africa showed how a private bank in the DRC was reportedly used to channel at least $138 million of public funds to Kabila’s family and associates.

Mutombo, Congo’s central bank governor between 2013 and 2021, is also alleged to have misappropriated more than $205 million in the financing of the Bukanga Lonzo agro-industrial park, along with former prime minister Matata Ponyo Mapon.

Like Yuma, Mutombo is a Katangan.

Lately, Gen John Numbi, DRC's former inspector general of the police and the army, who is also close to Kabila, has published a video message in which he attacks Tshisekedi.

In a harsh tone, Numbi said: “Félix Tshisekedi is today like an unconscious man playing with fire in a powder keg.”

Numbi, a well-known figure within the DRC as a senior police and military official, having been inspector general of both institutions in Kinshasa  was replaced in 2020. He fled the country in 2021 and was officially branded a deserter.

With Tshisekedi’s rise to power, Numbi who was close to Kabila was threatened with arrest and fled. He is suspected to be a member of a Katangese separatist group, the Union of Federalists and Independent Republicans (UFERI).

Is the Kabila camp, in Katanga, up to something?

During the Congo crisis in the 1960s, an attempt by the Katanga region, alongside South Kasai, to become independent from the newly-established DRC was crushed. But, as reported, secessionism in the region is still present today.